Bitcoin private key hacked by FBI? Do you really know anything about bitcoin?

Recently, it appeared on Weibo and various social media that Bitcoin was cracked by the FBI and users' assets could be misappropriated at will. Bitcoin is an American conspiracy; There is no anonymity in Bitcoin... And so on.

It started with a news from CNN on June 8 that the US Department of Justice seized $2.3 million worth of Bitcoins belonging to the hacking group Darkside in a joint operation between the FBI and Colonial Pipeline, the first time a criminal ransom has been seized by the US Department of Justice's digital extortion task force.

However, the news was interpreted by some media outlets who did not know the details to mean that the FBI had cracked the private key to get hold of the bitcoin. And some investors blamed it for a 12% one-day drop in bitcoin on June 8.

So, is this really the case? In this article, Rage Blockbeats takes you through the whole story and tells you why the Bitcoin private key can't be cracked.

Hackers have transferred millions of bitcoins to addresses the FBI has access to

The United States declared national economic status on May 10 because of a hacking attack on its largest fuel pipeline. The hacked Colonial Pipeline is the largest system of refined oil products in the United States, with about 8,850 kilometers of pipelines carrying about 3 million barrels of refined oil a day.

The ransomware that attacked Colonial Pipeline was called Darkside, a group that specialized in digital asset extortion. From December 2020 to May 2021, Darkside attacked US oil and gas infrastructure four times. Elliptic analyzed that Darkside received more than $90 million in ransoms from at least 47 victims.

For this attack on Colonial Pipeline, Darkside made a ransom demand for $5 million worth of Bitcoin. Colonial Pipeline paid 75 BTC to Colonial Pipeline on May 9, Beijing time. The hackers then began to transfer the tokens. Interested users can check out the public records of U.S. law enforcement officialsfileOr tracking hackers receive COINS address "bc1q7eqww9dmm9p48hx5yz5gcvmncu65w43wfytpsf"

According to public information, at present most of hackers blackmail COINS (63.69) transferred to the address of the master private key by the FBI "bc1qpx7vyv5tp7dm0g475ev527krg764t73dh77gls".

How did the FBI get the money back? Why is Bitcoin's private key so hard to crack?

Shortly after the FBI announced it had recovered most of the money the hackers had extorted, Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back said on Twitter that the FBI did not retrieve the money by breaking the private Bitcoin keys, but rather by obtaining the private Bitcoin wallet keys from the cloud servers used by the hackers.

As part of the operation, the FBI seized Darkside's proxy servers in the US, which held private Bitcoin keys. So he gained control of the wallet and transferred the bitcoins to a wallet address controlled by the FBI.

In fact, such things are not uncommon. Huazong, a well-known blogger, also said that in the early years, some people lost tokens because they kept their mnemonic words and private keys in their personal space on the forum.

So why are Bitcoin private keys or mnemonic words so hard to crack?

Since Bitcoin's private keys are made up of 256 bits of binary digits, this means that the Bitcoin network's private keys are capped at 2 to the power of 256, which in decimal terms is about 10 to the power of 77. Of course, the private key database is range, minimum is 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001, The most fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffebaaedce6af48a03bbfd25e8cd0364140 greatly.

Bitcoin's private and public keys are based on the principle of elliptic encryption, which means that the private key can compute the public key. After a series of digital signature operations, the public key can get the wallet address. And the process can only go one way.

So, based on the private key to push back the public key, and query wallet address balance?

As early as many years ago, the project "Cryptoguru" opened the "Bitcoin private key hits the database pool" to detect the wallet balance according to the private key. Cryptoguru is currently able to push 154 million private keys per second, and has pushed 40,995 trillion private keys since its inception. But the effect is not obvious, according to the official information, the whole pool income is not outstanding.

Knowing only the address of a Bitcoin wallet, and inverting the private key, can be considered an impossible task with the computing power of today's computers. And the benefit of bashing the library according to the private key is lower than the cost.

So it's impossible for the FBI to crack the private key to get Bitcoins. If the FBI could push back the private key based on the address and control the wallet address, it would mean that the FBI would be one of the richest government departments in the world.

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